waffle

The idea of “intellectual property” is intellectually bankrupt.

You don’t need me to tell you everything that’s wrong with the patent system. I am reliably assured that there’s been written long, best-selling books about it, of which I have read none, and weblog posts, of which I have read several. We all know that the idea stems from ownership, possession and a manic fear of pilfering which validity has been continuously declining, and which stopped overweighing the downsides a long time ago. The idea of patents is to benefit the commons and protect the small inventor; none are the case anymore. So I think I’ll write about something else.

When Apple’s not off suing companies for daring to adopt ideas that have been discovered, they’d like to control much of the environment that their hardware creates in which their software runs. The PC has been an enormous success, but not many have emulated that particular part of the equation. Apple don’t just retain control because they like being in control; they do it because it affords them the ability to be responsible for how everything is integrated. I think it’s fair to attribute some of their success and reputation for a good experience to this.

But it’s not all about that. When the original Macintosh launched, you could write programs that did everything. You may complain that the only reason programs could traipse through low memory was because the Mac was streamlined to the point of being underly insulated, and the spell of a fundamental memory protection problem that would follow it for 17 years would be a good argument. The case remains that when Andy Hertzfeld, legendary software engineer then no longer with Apple sat down to write Switcher, the first application to bring multi-tasking to the Mac, he was using the same SDK as everyone else (Toolbox).

Of course, Switcher was also implemented through very careful consideration, swapping a painstakingly detailed set of bytes in and out of their special memory segment. Steve Jobs went so far as to say that Andy would not have been able to build Switcher without having been with the team as they designed Toolbox and System (the original Mac OS). Apple bought Switcher and turned it into MultiFinder, which would eventually bring multitasking using the same principle but now regarded more officially.

This would never happen today. The iPhone is a far more closed platform. It provides a far better user experience in the areas where anything at all is offered, but the holes that would need to be opened for it to become an open platform are small. They can be opened without affecting the usability of the device, without infecting the device with viruses, without infecting the “user” with dangerous analogies to concurrent, crooked computer usability flaws and concepts, and without forcing Apple to peddle porn, seemingly explicit toddler-era humor and applications with network television programming-strength political commentary.

The interesting thing is that love finds a way. There are millions of jailbroken iPhones that already multi-task, sniff for Wi-Fi hotspots or tether without the consent of a grumpy carrier (let’s not go there). Apple has nothing to gain from pissing off its own customers. It seems to fit that they’re doing it out of spite. We know that Steve’s assertion from before isn’t true: Andy would simply have had to work more studiously to figure out the mechanism. There are jailbreak applications doing amazing things with no official backing API whatsoever on the iPhone.

This post isn’t about Apple. It’s about ideas and control. You can’t. You can’t control ideas. Rather importantly, the spread of ideas, and the ability to facilitate it, is probably the best tool in humanity’s chest right next to opposable thumbs, abstract thinking and awareness of the future. For every insipid patent that Apple have, have ever attempted or could ever file, there are ten ingenious ideas that have been thought before and made every single one of their previous creations possible and dramatically more powerful.

For any company to continue this farce of “intellectual property” is ridiculous. For Apple that’s been so creative with it is abhorrent. I know they’re not stupid. I know they’re not greedy. I’m hoping they’ll eventually turn around, to the benefit of their customers and themselves. Rather, I know there will eventually be devices that are as good as any Apple device but respects the emergent laws of the universe and human behavior. When that choice exists, I’ll know which one to pick.